Shaman’s Crossing, the first in Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son trilogy, left us with Nevare having survived the Speck plague outbreak at the Academy and looking forward to getting his life back on track, blissfully unaware that, as a character in a Robin Hobb book, being bullied and surviving the plague is the least of his troubles. Forest Mage takes all of Nevare’s hopes, dreams, loved ones and the life he’s been building and torches them all, dragging him down to a bottomless pit of despair […]
Robin Hobb never fails to deliver
For some reason, I’d been putting off reading Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son trilogy. Partly, I think, because it hadn’t received the wholly glowing reviews of her other works on Goodreads, and partly because I’d been so sucked in to the worlds of Fitz and the Fool and the Elderlings, and didn’t think that stories set elsewhere would satisfy me. It wasn’t until I was bemoaning the fact that I still hadn’t got my hands on the latest Fitz trilogy that I decided to give The […]
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
Sixteen years have passed since the events of Predator’s Gold and Anchorage is no longer on the move, having settled down at the edge of Vineland. Living on Anchorage-in-Vineland are Freya, Caul, Tom and Hester…and Wren, the baby that Hester was carrying who is now a bored 15 year old, longing for excitement. When a charming pirate – one of Caul’s old crew – turns up in Anchorage-in-Vineland looking for a valuable object, Wren seizes her chance for an adventure only for it to go […]
Unseeing things
The City & The City is an odd book to try and describe. A detective story with a sci-fi feel, although it’s not really sci-fi, it introduces us to the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma which sit side-by-side and, in some parts, overlap. Those overlapped boundaries are ‘crosshatched’, belonging to both cities at the same time, with the citizens of each trained to ‘unsee’ the buildings, vehicles and people of the neighbouring city. Seeing anything in the neighbouring city, or going so far as […]